Talk:Tech/News/Archives/2015

Bugzilla is over, links are obsolete

As Bugzilla was closed, links on this page (under "Monitor changes") are unuseful. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:47, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

I love my Tech News Emails, but I'd like a topic in the email

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T64661

I enjoy getting the Tech News email alerts in my inbox, however the emails themselves are rather non-descriptive. Since they're not the only thing I've subscribed to (VisualEditor News as well) I have to wonder what I'm going to read once I click the link. I'm a rather light user and could imagine multiple subscriptions could be even more problematic. Is it possible to include a subject in the email somewhere letting me know it's related to Tech News?

Here's a screenshot as an example. http://i.imgur.com/5WujdCw.png

Would this be better addressed to MediaWiki message delivery folks?

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ckoerner (talk)

The massmessage senders have nothing to do with it. I have noticed that Echo's emails are vastly less descriptive than MediaWiki core's. phabricator:T64661 seems to cover it. --Nemo 18:38, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech news letter head

@Nemo and Guillaume (WMF): I prepped a template for when Tech News is repubed in the Signpost: en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Tech news. Any concerns? Not sure about the report's visual identity, since it seems to lake a definitive logo at the moment. File is here. Thanks, ResMar 14:35, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Resident Mario: Thank you for your message. I don't have any concerns; We've never really needed a logo until now so don't worry too much about visual identity :) The only consistent thing we've done is try to stick to the Solarized color scheme in the header and in charts & diagrams, but that's not a strict rule. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 15:11, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The colours are fine, but the header was always far too wide for my browser window, I hope you'll get rid of some redundant Tech and/or replace Wikimedia Engineering by something smaller such as Engineering at some point in time when all interesting bugs are fixed. –Be..anyone (talk) 17:47, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Header lines of individual copies

The header of the translated tech news in the individual wikis is untranslated. Please amend. -- 46.115.7.28 18:39, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Hello and thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, This isn't technically possible at the moment. The field for the header in the MassMessage tool is too small for us to include the translations. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Wrong category

There is a recurring error in the draft pages of the tech news. They end up in a non-existing category Category:Drafts//ksh, e.g. - note the double slash. --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 05:20, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

There are two ksh (Ripoarisch) pages in Category:Drafts//ksh, is that an issue only for ksh or a bug in {{draft}} near <includeonly>[[Category:Drafts{{#if:{{{1|}}} | {{Langcat| 1 = {{{1|}}} }} | {{#if: {{pagelang}} | /{{pagelang}} }} }}]]</includeonly> ? –Be..anyone (talk) 11:31, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Future Weeks

• Week 23 June 1, 2015
• Week 24 June 8, 2015
• Week 25 June 15, 2015
• Week 26 June 22, 2015
• Week 27 June 29, 2015
• Week 28 July 6, 2015
• Week 29 July 13, 2015
• Week 30 July 20, 2015
• Week 31 July 27, 2015
• Week 32 August 3, 2015
• Week 33 August 10, 2015
• Week 34 August 17, 2015
• Week 35 August 24, 2015
• Week 36 August 31, 2015
• Week 37 September 7, 2015
• Week 38 September 14, 2015
• Week 39 September 21, 2015
• Week 40 September 28, 2015
• Week 41 October 5, 2015
• Week 42 October 12, 2015
• Week 43 October 19, 2015
• Week 44 October 26, 2015
• Week 45 November 2, 2015
• Week 46 November 9, 2015
• Week 47 November 16, 2015
• Week 48 November 23, 2015
• Week 49 November 30, 2015
• Week 50 December 7, 2015
• Week 51 December 14, 2015
• Week 52 December 21, 2015
• Week 53 December 28, 2015

2602:306:B8E0:82C0:4903:CE81:A219:CA2F 01:59, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Problems of the translation of this page.

1. In Translations:Tech/News/56/en, there is an $isodate, which is unsuited for translations. Please use a localized date format instead.
2. The message Translations:Tech/News/26/en is a link anchor, while all others in the list have their links inside the message. Please make it equal to all list elements, so as to make translating easier.

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Purodha (talk)

Correction needed on the french version of Tech New

Hi,

I noticed following misspellings on the message of Tech news 2015/39 in french language :

« Actualitées techniques » has to be changed to « Actualités techniques », there is no e for this word.

Thanks for your attention, --Do not follow (talk) 17:19, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, this has been fixed.

(And of course, you can fix any errors you spot yourself if you want to – just press "translate" where you'd normally find the edit button.) /Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:11, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Phabricator discussion

In order to make sure anyone who's interested in discussing the future of Tech News and has opinions don't miss it, there's a Phabricator discussion about Tech News in German that evolved into things with relevance to anyone who has opinion about Tech News. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:04, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Changes this week - MediaWiki:Cite error references duplicate key

A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [1]

I am not really familiar how things works here and if this is the correct place for my request. Is there any way to disable (for an unknown period of time) MediaWiki:Cite error references duplicate key (for Slovenian wikipedia). We automatically generate ref tags in many infoboxes through sl:Module:Sources. So, many artices have now ugly red info about Cite error, and editors cannot do anything about it. We need time to correct this, if ever, because we depends on russian wikipedians (we do not have genius to do this). --Pinky sl (talk) 17:25, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

It is solved, thanks to Armenian wikipedian [2]. --Pinky sl (talk) 20:45, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

How can we use some templates to provide the title and footer?

Such as "Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.",because I think every week of tech news has same header.If we can put it in a template,it may makes translators easier. --Zhangjintao (talk) 05:53, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Or getting the translation memmory to work. For some reason it never brings up the translations for those sections despite the fact that they are identical every week. --Lsanabria (talk) 11:58, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

+1. I gave up translating these messages as the translation memory never works... --Stryn (talk) 14:16, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, that'd be nice. I tend to have a tab with last week's translation open when I do the Swedish translation, which works OK, but it's one extra unnecessary step. I'll look into it. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:56, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Created a Phabricator ticket as well: phab:T115460. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:29, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

If nothing else, because the best way to find a Phabricator ticket when you suspect there already is one on the subject but can't find it is to create a new one, and someone else will close it as a duplicate and thus find the one you were looking for for you. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Symbols

Tech News contains both recurring items that are pretty much the same every week (there will be a new MediaWiki version, you can talk to the VisualEditor developers) as well as some items that are mainly interesting for bot/gadget/etc developers. It's been suggested we should use symbols to make this a bit easier for (most of) the readers. My proposal would look like this:

• Recurring item (thanks Quiddity).
• Item probably not relevant to non-technical readers.

I will use these symbols unless anyone has a better suggestion. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

@Johan (WMF): Sounds good. might be good for high-priority issues. Also, is a bit clearer. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that one is much better. And slightly frustrating, having spent hours on Commons looking for a good cogwheel symbol before I gave up and uploaded the one I linked to above, so convinced it had to be there somewhere, but not finding it. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

 Guillaume (WMF) likes this. 16:17, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Alt text

Is there any way to add title text to this so users can see what these are supposed to mean when they hover over them? I like them, but I think it's a good to make these as easy to understand as possible. --Nicereddy (talk) 17:08, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

We should do that, yes. Thanks for the reminder. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 22:42, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, I tried adding alt=.... to the icon (per mw:Help:Images), but it didn't work as expected. Can anyone fix this following example? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:55, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

How about <span title="Foo Bar">[[File:VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Advanced.svg|18px|link=]]</span>? (Comes out as ) --I am k6ka ^{Talk to me!} _{See what I have done} 18:21, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

-- (currently: [[File:VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Advanced.svg|18px|link=|alt=alternate text should appear on hover]])

These titles are currently not translated, which lessen their usefulness — Ltrlg (talk) – 09:31, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Will address this for the next issue. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 17:28, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Visual distinction

Hi, @Johan (WMF):. I notice a problem with the specific pair of icons that you've chosen. They commit the capital sin of icons that must work together, which is sharing the same general shape and weight - i.e. both are round, black thingies with spikes. At their small size (particularly when seen in mobile) this makes them difficult to tell apart; you have to carefully look at them to see which is which, thus defeating the purpose of having icons in the first place. Could you replace one of them with an icon based on a different basic shape?

May I suggest using a rectangle-based icon for the recurring items, such as either an envelope (the standard symbol for "new message" in a recurrent stream) or a folder with a spark (the symbol for "new content"). The "recycling arrows" symbol is the wrong metaphor here anyway, as it's commonly used to mean an item which the user can press to update, i. e. an action button, not a passively updated stream of content. Diego Moya (talk) 18:35, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

I'll look into it! Thanks for the feedback. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 22:42, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

I agree with increasing the visual distinction, but a googleimage search indicates that 1 or 2 arrows in a circle are common icons/representations for "recurrence". (Also, the aim is to make the recurring items more ignorable, so that people can scan for new content more easily. Hence the folder+spark wouldn't work, and I'm not sure about the envelope.) Can you see anything in c:Category:Octicons or parent/sub-folders, that would be good for this purpose? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:55, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Maybe could work to denote "for developers". /Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

No opinions on that?

(The reason why this might not be implemented already in next Tech News is that I don't want to change things four times in one and a half month. Let's keep the updates about Tech News in Tech News as few as possible.) /Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:13, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Will go ahead with this next week, unless a better idea has turned up by then. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Note: I'm working on Tech/News this week, and will leave the implementation of this change until Johan returns. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:55, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

This has (finally) been addressed in the current Tech News draft. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:36, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, the distinction between the old and new icon seems to work well. 212.0.102.74 17:07, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for , it is best for the visual distinction. Regards, Kertraon (talk) 23:20, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Maybe?

This has been resolved for a few weeks, but it's kind of a big deal, so maybe it should be added?

Edit conflicts were previously broken on the mobile website. Edit conflicts can now be resolved in both wikitext and visual editors. (phab:T111894)

What do you think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

subject line in Flow

Hey :)

The subject line is kinda screwy in Flow as the markup isn't parsed. See for example d:User talk:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE). --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 09:11, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): That's been almost fixed for a few weeks, but Matt keeps getting re-assigned to more urgent things. >.< However, once phab:T59153 is resolved, topic titles will be parsed the same as edit-summaries. Cheers, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:22, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Which should happen after next MediaWiki deployment, we hope. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:35, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Page View API

This announcement might be appropriate for Tech/News. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

[3] too? I'm told it shouldn't impact community people, but better safe? If you need any details, please ask Anomie. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

There may be some gadgets or user scripts that will be affected, so it's probably good to announce. Anomie (talk) 19:44, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Done and done. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Date format

My personal pet peeve: latest tech news (Tech/News/2015/49) uses the MDY date format in a few places. And worse, it also uses DMY ;) Please be consistent, and preferably standardize towards DMY. (https://i.imgur.com/Ev6xBLB.png) Matma Rex (talk) 23:53, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing it out! Will try to keep it in mind. :) /Johan (WMF) (talk) 13:27, 2 December 2015 (UTC)